Miracles~CSL

I have picked up Miracles again (by C.S. Lewis). Love it love it love it. Just wanted to type in an excerpt from Chapter 12, The Propriety of Miracles:

"For those who can suppose that God's external act, seen from within, would be that same complexity of mathematical relations which Nature, scientifically studied, reveals? It is like thinking that a poet builds up his line out of those metrical feet into which we can analyse it, or that living speech takes grammar as its starting point. But the best illustration of all is Bergson's. Let us suppose a race of people whose peculiar mental limitation compels them to regard a painting as something made up of little coloured dots which have been put together like a mosaic. Studying the brushwork of a great painting, through their magnifying glasses, they discovery more and more complicated relations between the dots, and sort these relations out, with great toil into certain regularities. Their labour will not be in vain. These regularities will in fact 'work'; they will cover most of the facts. But if they go on to conclude that any departure from them would be unworthy of the painter, and an arbitrary breaking of his own rules, they will be far astray. For the regularities they have observed never were the rule the painter was following. What they painfully reconstruct from a million dots, arranged in an agonising complexity, he really produced with a single lightning-quick turn of the wrist, his eye meanwhile taking in the canvas as a whole and his mind obeying laws of composition which the observers, counting their dots, have not yet come within sight of, and perhaps never will. I do not say that the normalities of Nature are unreal. The living foundation of divine energy, solidified for purposes of this spatio-temporal Nature into bodies moving in space and time, and thence, by our abstract thought, turned into mathematical formulae, does in fact for us, commonly fall into such and such patterns. In finding out these patterns we are therefore gaining real, and often useful, knowledge. But to think that a disturbance* of them would constitute a breach of the living rule and organic unity whereby God, from His own point of view, works, is a mistake. If miracles do occur then we may be sure that not to have wrought them would be the real inconsistency."

If you can't tell already, Lewis is thinking out the process of miracles. Before this chapter, he goes through different arguments, natural vs. supernatural... something to really read on your own... something I will probably have to read again to get more of a grasp. Whew. I'm now on page 173, have 121 pages to go!

*by disturbance, he means an intrusion into nature, a 'breaking' of natural law as we know it.